Tracking Your Business Finances with NolaPro

I've been doing side work for years, and recently, I've become voluntarily
self-employed. Like most small and even large companies, one of my biggest
problems is tracking who owes me money and whom I need to pay. And, I kind
of
want to know whether I'm actually making a living. This is where a good
accounting program becomes essential.

About six months ago, I started looking for an accounting program in order
to track my side work. I needed something that was easy to use, ran on
Linux and preferably was Web-based. It had to be easy to use, because I'm
not an accountant or a financial analyst; I'm a nerd. The program had to
run on Linux, or I wouldn't have anywhere to run it. I wanted it to be
Web-based, because I didn't want to have to install the software on all
my machines, and I wanted to be able to log time and charges from remote
locations. The Holy Grail would have been if it also would integrate with
eGroupWare.

I looked at a lot of accounting packages during my search. The ones that
worked at all didn't seem very mature. I had resolved simply to deal with
buggy software, when I was offered the opportunity to review NolaPro from
Noguska LLC (www.nolapro.com/index-5.html).

NolaPro is a Web-based accounting program that runs on Linux using Apache,
MySQL and PHP. NolaPro can track customers, orders, accounts payable,
inventory, employees and, everyone's favorite, accounts receivable. NolaPro
also has a point-of-sale system, a B2B module, an e-commerce module and a
general ledger—all of this in one very mature, polished software package.

NolaPro originally was an in-house program used to track Noguska's printing
operations. Eventually, Noguska decided to release the program to the public
as a free download. As the company doesn't charge money for the program, it
doesn't have an advertising budget for it, which explains why I'd never heard
of it when I was looking for an accounting program. Even so, the NolaPro
user base is growing, and the company actively supports the program. One of
the company's motivations for releasing the product is to help introduce
its customers to Linux as a flexible and low-cost system, thus reducing
its costs as well as its customer's costs.

Noguska offers fee-based custom development and integration services to
NolaPro users. The results of this paid development find their way into the
next release of NolaPro. So, the entire user community benefits when a
company pays to have a particular feature added to NolaPro. Donovon Lee,
Noguska's CEO, described it to me as a Robin Hood business model where the
richer, larger companies pay for features they need, and the smaller,
poorer companies benefit from the results. The results in this case are
that NolaPro has the features companies want, not the features
the software companies think they want.

Installing the program was pretty easy. I simply downloaded a tarball and
extracted it into my Web server's htdocs directory. Then, I pointed my Web
browser at the resulting subdirectory, and the installation program
presented me with a checklist of things I had to do to make the program
work (Figure 1). In my case, I had to make some configuration changes
to PHP. The program led me by the hand, and when all of the prerequisites
were met, I was presented with an initial login screen—easy.

Figure 1. NolaPro Initial Setup

Once I had the program running, I was anxious to get some of my customers
into the system (Figure 2). The customer module lets me store just about
anything I could care to know about my customers. The interface isn't
fancy, but it is intuitive.

Figure 2. Adding a Customer

But, billing is where the money's at, right? Clicking on Billing and then
New Invoice was all it took to start a new customer invoice (Figure 3).
The Customer Name field let me type the name of the company I wanted to
invoice, and as I typed, it would search my customer list and fill in the
best match. This feature is one of those unexpected gems that make a
program easy to use. Once I find the right company, I press Enter and
then can enter the terms of the invoice (Figure 4). Clicking Next lets
me enter the specifics of the invoice on a line-item basis (Figure 5). The
resulting invoice is a professional PDF file that I can send to my clients
and that I can track to ensure timely payment.

Figure 3. Adding a New Invoice

Figure 4. Adding the Invoice Terms

Figure 5. Entering Invoice Specifics on Line-Item Basis

The Payables module is almost as intuitive as the Billing module, although
it's not as fun to input where all your money is going as it is to
input where it's coming from. This is one area where I had to e-mail NolaPro
support. I couldn't seem to add a vendor to the database. It turned out
that I had to enter the company name as well as the first and last name of a
contact at the company. The support staff returned my e-mail within a few
minutes, and I was on my way. I don't write a lot of checks, and I'm too
small to need purchase orders, but it's nice to see that NolaPro will track
them just the same.

The Orders module was something I discovered almost by accident. Being
a computer nerd, I tend to think in terms of “projects”, not
“orders”. But, once I realized that a programming project was
nothing but a service order, I found that NolaPro's Orders module would
allow me to track all my billable hours against a given order, and when
the work was done, I could convert the order into a ready-made invoice. I
had been tracking my billable time in an OpenOffice.org spreadsheet, which
was less than ideal.

NolaPro also allows me to enter an estimated cost
for each order, which lets me make sure all my projects come in
under budget. For orders that entail shipping a product from inventory,
NolaPro allows you to create a fulfillment order, so you can
estimate shipping costs and modify inventory counts.

Something else I used to track in a spreadsheet was inventory. My VoIP
business maintains an inventory of telephone adapters, and it's nice to be
able to tell how many I have on hand and where I've stashed them.
NolaPro's Inventory module lets me track inventory items that may be stored
at multiple locations. It also allows me to set the minimum and maximum
number of each inventory item to keep in stock, as well as minimum ordering
quantity. I get a substantial discount when I order phone adapters in
quantity, for example, and NolaPro allows me to take that fact into
consideration when I re-order.

Once a company grows beyond a certain size, it inevitably needs to hire
employees. NolaPro has a very mature
employee-tracking system. Sure, it
tracks your employees' names and phone numbers. It tracks how many hours they
work, and it even has an optional time-card function, so they can log their own
hours. Then, things get complicated. NolaPro even tracks benefits and taxes.
Perusing the whole Payroll section was a daunting experience that left me
with a new appreciation for the human resources representative at my old
place of employment. With NolaPro, you can track employee benefits, company
contributions, deductions, direct deposits and pension plans. The program
would let you configure just about any benefits package you could imagine.

Additionally, I thought it was a nice touch that you even can generate phone lists and
birthday lists of all your employees.

Each of NolaPros's modules includes its own reporting function. For
example, the Billing section includes an Invoice Aging report that shows
which invoices are more than 30 days old. The Orders section includes a
report that shows open orders and how much money you have tied up
in them.

NolaPro's Ledger features go well beyond anything I need as a small-time
entrepreneur. Here's where you find a general ledger, budgeting and bank
statement reconciliation. Most of the GL functions are tied to a set of
standardized general accounts, such as cash on hand, sales income and so
forth. The
Budgeting module then allows you to set financial targets for each GL
account on a per-month basis. The Ledger functions obviously are geared
toward companies that are large enough to have an accountant or bookkeeper.

A couple modules are included in NolaPro that I haven't had
occasion to use, but I think they are worth mentioning briefly. The
Point of Sale module allows a user to sell items from inventory and accept
cash, check or credit card as payment, without having to create an invoice.
The B2B module allows business partners to log in and view outstanding
orders, invoices and payment history. The B2B module also allows partners
to pay bills via credit card. I've been told that Noguska will be releasing
a Web Services API that will allow third-party developers to integrate with
NolaPro. I've already got some ideas on what to do with the API when it's
available. The API should be available sometime in the fall of 2008.

Of course, many features are available as add-ons for a
nominal fee. For example, the Daily Accounting Summary add-on shows a daily
snapshot of checking balances, receivables aging totals, payments received,
orders completed and payables aging totals together on one page for easy
viewing, and it costs only $2.00. On the other hand, the Employee Time
Tracking add-on I mentioned earlier provides a way for employees to
record hours worked, and it costs $299. It should be noted that standalone
time-tracking systems can cost much more.

Now that I've used the program daily for a couple weeks, I've
discovered a work flow that just seems to fit the types of businesses that
I run.

When I take on a new programming or consulting project, I create a service
order for the project. Then, as I work on the project, I can log my time
and note what work was performed on the project. When the project is
finished, I can convert the order, history and all, into an invoice that I
then send to my client.

My VoIP business is a bit more complicated, because it has an inventory,
hardware shipments and regular, recurring billing. I'm able to keep track
of how many units I have in inventory. Then, when I take on a new customer,
I create a Fulfillment Order for the initial setup and hardware delivery.
This order automatically commits a unit from inventory and warns me if I
need to re-order. Then, I create a payment plan for the new customer, which
automatically creates an invoice for the customer each quarter.

In the time I've been using NolaPro, I've had a few occasions to contact
technical support. I've been told that, officially, the free e-mail and
telephone support is done on a best-effort basis. In practice, I found
NolaPro's e-mail support to be very responsive. I sent in one question at
midnight and had a reply by 10am the next day. The context-sensitive
help has complete descriptions of each function and includes example screenshots. NolaPro's on-line forums are organized by feature and seem to have a
high signal-to-noise ratio. Finally, there's the video training library.
Yes, free video training. If you want to learn how to add a new service
order, you can click on a few hyperlinks from the NolaPro home page. From
there, you can watch and listen to a video of someone actually performing
that task. The video describes the process, and you clearly can see
what menu items to use. It's more than just a slideshow with a
brief outline. Some of the videos are from older versions of the program,
which means the menus have a slightly dated layout, but even so, the video
training is well done and quite usable.

NolaPro is able to handle a fairly broad range of business
types, but it doesn't do everything. Some of my consulting customers
require regular incremental invoicing on projects, even before the project
is finished. I discovered that NolaPro won't let me split an order up and
invoice part of it. I also discovered that the invoicing module tracks
inventory items by count, whereas I need to track them individually by
serial number. I was a bit disappointed by the fact that when I asked the
program to e-mail an invoice to a customer, it sent a very generic e-mail
with the invoice attached as an oddly named .pdf file, and none of this
was configurable. I've resolved this by simply exporting the .pdf files and
attaching
them to my own e-mail messages. Finally, I don't know any two people who
do their budgets the same way. NolaPro's budgeting capability seemed to be
too closely tied to the GL accounts, which I found cumbersome to wrap my
head around. With these weaknesses in mind, NolaPro is a very powerful
program, and I'm sure that people in different lines of business would
find other things they felt needed to be improved. No software
program can do everything to everyone's satisfaction.

For me, accounting is one of the necessary evils of doing business. My job
is to solve technical problems and to deliver a service, and the tools need
to stay out of the way of the real work. NolaPro is a powerful and
intuitive software tool, and I've found the program to be a pleasure to
use. It's certainly on my list of keepers.

Mike Diehl is a recently self-employed Computer Nerd and lives in
Albuquerque, New Mexico, with his wife and three sons. He can be reached at
mdiehl@diehlnet.com.

Comments

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this program has been available and free for a couple years now and there aren't any plans for it to be otherwise. they are shipping it globally and trying to consume as much of the international market as they can, which can only be done as free software. their revenue comes from customizing it and a parallel cloud solution.

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